Déja‘ Donné’s 1999 international hit “Aria Spinta” (roughly translated from the Italian as ‘pushed air’) was a post-modern kinetic screwball comedy. Dance Umbrella audiences laughed and lapped it up in 2001. That same year company cofounders Lenka Flory and Simone Sandroni premiered “In Bella Copia”, a 75-minute performance that will be seen in Umbrella 2003. In English the title converts into ‘fair copy’. Speaking in early May near the middle of a three-week research residency at Dance 4, Nottingham’s national dance agency, Sandroni links the production’s name to the idea of a ‘final draft.’ The phrase “In Bella Copia”, he explains, alludes to ‘going out in our Sunday best to behave in a different way and become somebody or something else.’ But, he and the show itself caution, people sometimes become the masks they wear.

As in “Aria Spinta”, Déja‘ Donné again explore the disparity between the real and actual, the public and private face. They do so with humour, passion and an unruly heroism. Like the earlier performance, this one is full of seduction and play.

The stage in Bella Copia is dominated by a huge clothes rack from which dozens of assorted outfits are suspended. Cocktail frocks, slacks, jumpsuits and nighties are jumbled randomly together, and one of the best things about this otherwise disappointing piece of dance theatre is that it doesn't last long enough for everybody to try everything on.

SEXUAL desire is one of the motors driving the six characters in In Bella Copia, a delightfully edgy comedy presented by the Dance Umbrella festival. But, as the cast so generously demonstrates, it may be attended by embarrassment and potential violation.

Déja Donné’s programme notes for “In Bella Copia” ended with the sentence “We will revolt………and turn to our nakedness and to the “Fair Copy” of ourselves”. I feared the worst and got it.

The recurring motif of the evening was a rendition of the song “I can’t give you anything but love, baby” interspersed with the MC’s spiel from “Cabaret”

“Bella Copia” was about three themes: sex, violence and humiliation, and the sex was mostly of the violent variety too. The setting consisted of lighting stands and a long rail of charity shop type garments, which doubled as the wings. The choreography is fast and sharp with kung fu style lunges with the arms building up an atmosphere of aggression.

A woman is graphically groped by the men to the disquiet of a young girl in an elaborate long orange dress and trailing veil observing from the back of the stage. Eventually she becomes involved in a rather clumsy sexual encounter herself, eagerly stripping her male partner down to his underpants until he turns unaccountably coy causing her to turn her attentions to one of the girls: that too is unsatisfactory and she approaches two of the men, with the words “kiss me gently”. At first they comply, but then turn rough with one of the men violating her in a vicious simulated rape.

There are some attempts at humour when a girl performs a strip tease routine in front of two slavering males, but the humour turns dark after she blindfolds one of the men with her knickers. The other man caresses him while he squirms with delight, thinking it’s the girl who is doing the stroking. On discovering he’s been involved in a gay encounter, he pursues his would-be male lover with a metal bar until his victim is forced to escape by climbing to the top of a lighting stand. His attacker then frenziedly beats at the stand, while his terrified prey (inexplicable) sheds all his clothes. Just as inexplicably, all but one of the cast follows suit and duck beneath the clothing rail to stand naked at the back of the stage. The one remaining dancer proceeds to slowly un-pin the coarse ugly wig she had been wearing, revealing her beautiful black glossy hair beneath. The only truly erotic image in a work concerned with sex and pleasure but delivering only uncomfortable images of violence.

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